


Fifty Years

by Silvereye



Category: Captain America
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:28:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/pseuds/Silvereye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers is found twenty years earlier. He meets Howard's son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifty Years

Steve does not remember drowning. He can remember the ice rushing towards him and everything flashing brilliant, terrifying white like the heart of a dying star. After that, nothing.

*

He should not wake, but something goes very wrong and he is dragged out of his cold sleep before the plane reaches its destination. Waking hurts. More than the fall ever did.

Perhaps he screams. He does not know.

Someone stares at him, a doctor? Her eyes are kind even if it is obvious she has not prepared for this.

She is saying something. He cannot concentrate.

Steve sleeps again and there is no pain or cold.

*

Everything is different.

They try to hide it.

But it is obvious in all the tiniest details they cannot think of. People speak differently. Lights are strange.

He does not want to think what it means.

*

“What day is it?”

“January 18.” The doctor is not the one he saw before, her eyes are less kind, her expression earnest.

“What year?”

“I don’t know if I can tell you.”

“Please.”

“January 18, 1991.”

He was twenty-one the day he went down with the plane. He has slept more than twice as long.

The doctor looks at him very silently while numbers and fears dance, dance, dance. When Steve closes his eyes and says nothing she leaves.

*

He has missed Howard by days. They let him out of his supervised room so he could pick up a newspaper in the waiting area, look at the front news and feel his heart drop.

He does not look like Howard at all, this old, weathered man whose obituary he reads.

But it is Steve who has not changed. Who just stopped.

*

He goes to the funeral. There are so many people there no one notices him.

Howard’s son looks like him. They have the same face they show to the public. He looks stoic.

Steve wants to get acquainted with him.

He does not know how.

*

“Hello. My name is Steven Rogers. I’m… um…”

Anthony Stark’s eyes are very sharp. “Go pull someone else.”

*

Tony (always Tony, never Anthony) believes him in the end.

He is like Howard in so many ways. Steve learns very quickly that this is not a phrase he wants to hear.

*

Tony Stark does not have friends. At least that what Steve sometimes thinks.

He is brilliant and overflowing and capable of treating everyone with the same unflinching friendliness, so what are his gestures worth, in the end?

But then, he cannot judge. He goes home to his empty apartment in Brooklyn and waits for another day that will not differ from the one before. Beggars are not choosers.

*

Steve knows it is not healthy, the way he lives. But he is not good with people.

And their reactions to the new him (he never stops thinking of his post-serum body as the new one) throw him off. His assumptions don’t work. He guesses it would be worse if he had gone from big to small, but even so it is unnerving.

*

Tony is a difficult friend to have. He is reckless and selfish and distracted by smallest of things. He vanishes for days and lies too easily.

Sometimes Steve wants to walk away.

He is always drawn back, first by loneliness, then by friendship.

*

Steve holds Pepper Potts in high regard. She has the patience of a saint.

The Sunday lunches are probably her idea. Steve is invited more often than not.

*

Steve learns to date. He knows that most of the women consider him hopelessly old-fashioned, but he cannot help himself. This is how his mother raised him.

It could be worse. Peggy’s no-nonsense attitude prepared him for some of it.

He sometimes still thinks of Peggy, but he is afraid of finding her again. He will do it at some point. Just… not now.

*

The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division is nothing like its predecessor where Steve once worked.

He adapts.

Some of the agents know him by hearsay. None are old enough to remember him on their own.

One of the junior agents stutters and drops his papers the very first time they meet. He reminds him of the kind-eyed doctor.

He later learns Agent Coulson is her son.

*

Steve tries to be there for Tony. He knows what it is like to be a public figure first and one’s own self second.

Tony Stark does not need anyone’s help.

No. Tony Stark does not want anyone’s help.

He is too proud to admit he is having a problem and they have so many screaming matches over this that Steve does not want to keep trying any more. Of course he does.

*

Steve’s mother would tell him to settle down. That he is too old to be unmarried.

She might be right, but he likes his lifestyle. He has friends. He has a job. He just has not found the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life.

*

Rhodey is right, of course, you cannot find someone on a terrain as difficult as the part of Afghanistan Tony was taken in.

Taken. He is not dead.

He paces and Pepper paces with him, days growing into weeks. She really must be a saint.

*

Steve dreams of cold, cold mountain passes, but the one who falls has Tony’s face.

He is cold when he wakes up and spends rest of the night shivering.

He is so tired of losing people.

*

Steve has always come back. And Tony has, too, in his oblivious, offhand way.

This time is not different.


End file.
